Reduce your medical bills. Can you?

Heart patients have to take medicines regularly to reduce angina. People suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis are also dependent on high doses of medicine to survive.

These medicines, when they reach the blood of the patients perform their appropriate action, but as soon as they reach the kidneys – they are filtered and thrown out of the body. Thus they have to be consumed daily depending upon the hours the kidney takes to eliminate them. If it takes eight hours- patient has to take 3 tablets daily, if it takes 12 hours, the patient has to take 2 tablets daily. This means the person has to be on regular medicine.

Take an example of a heart patient. In absence of lifestyle changes and increased level of blood pressure, cholesterol or triglycerides these medicine tend to increase. This takes the patients towards a future heart attack. If the condition worsened the dose of the medicine have to be increased. Even after the operations like Bypass surgery or angioplasty the patients have to continue taking daily medicines throughout life.

The cost of heart medicines has been artificially jacked up by the some of the drug companies – as they know that the patients have to keep on taking these medicines for a long time. But these medicines are not that costly. Take an example – cholesterol lowering medicine called Atorvastatin 20mg can be brought at a cost of 3-5 rupees ( brand names like lipikind, Atorfit), where as some brands of the same drug is being sold at 14 rupees (Storvas).

Ninety percent of the cardiac medicines have about 25-30 compounds and can be provided at 30-50% of the present cost to the heart patients. Most of the drug companies hire medical representatives with huge cost, plus they need to give money to three middlemen – stockists, whole sellers and retailers. Often the retailers have 30-40% margin.

There are two ways following which you can reduce your medical bills-

First follow a healthy lifestyle, Most of the health problems are due to wrong lifestyle. If you follow a simple and healthy lifestyle, you will have less health problems and thus need not to depend on medicine.

Secondly, always ask for a generic name of the drugs prescribed by the doctors. This will help you to get the options of choosing a cheaper brand.